The interoperability of IPsec implementations on various platforms has been becoming better and better over the last few years. For example, Windows 7 and newer releases fully support the IKEv2 (RFC 4306) and MOBIKE (RFC 4555) standards, and iOS started to support configuration of IKEv2 in the GUI since version 9.0.

In this tutorial, we’ll install strongSwan 5.3.3 in openwrt 15.05, configure it to provide IKEv2 service with public key authentication of the server and username/password based authentication of the clients using EAP-MSCHAP v2, and finally setup the VPN clients in Windows, Android and iOS so they can connect to it. Much of the complexity of IKEv2 configuration lies in the creation of SSL certificates.

When Ubuntu users want to try other Ubuntu flavors, e.g. Xubuntu and Lubuntu, they usually just install their meta packages:

$ sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

or

$ sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

apt-get can install their dependencies automatically. However, when users want to remove the alternative Ubuntu flavors completely, they are out of luck, because inter-dependencies among many packages can be rather complex, and apt tools simply does not automatically remove the dependencies of meta packages.Continue reading Removing alternative Ubuntu flavors completely